Do young politicians prioritize other types of municipal spending than old politicians? We study this question using hand-collected candidate-level data on municipal elections (1996-2020), along with detailed administrative data on municipal spending in Bavaria. Our identification strategy makes...

We study management practices and performance of public sector organizations in Germany. For a representative sample of municipalities, we provide survey evidence for substantial heterogeneity in the use of structured management practices. This heterogeneity is not driven by differences across...

The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists' minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can...

Small-scale federal democracies depend on the active participation of individuals in local political office. Both anecdotal evidence and empirical studies across Western democracies indicate a growing difficulty in recent decades to recruit candidates for municipal offices. This study examines...

The wage paid to politicians affects both the choice of citizens to run for an elective office and the performance of those who are appointed. First, if skilled individuals shy away from politics because of higher opportunities in the private sector, an increase in politicians' pay may change...

This paper evaluates the effects of changes in the supply of news provided by newspapers on electoral participation, political selection, and government efficiency. We address these issues in the Italian context by constructing a new dataset covering the presence of local news by different types...

We investigate the relationship between the time politicians stay in office and the functioning of public procurement. To this purpose, we collect a data set on the Italian municipal governments and all the procurement auctions they administered between 2000 and 2005. Identification is achieved...

We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3,500 local newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty (ΕPU-S), one that captures national and international...

High growth firms (HGFs) are important for job creation and considered to be precursors of economic growth. We investigate how product- and labor-market regulations, as well as the quality of regional governments that implement these regulations, affect HGF development across European regions....